News

Morteza Hoseinzadeh's work at Samsung over the summer won the Best Paper Award at IPCCC 2017. The work focuses on optimizing the performance of NVMe storage systems in the cloud. Morteza's collaborators include Professor Ningfang Mi and PhD students, Zhengyu Yang and Janki Bhimani from Northeastern University. Well done, Morteza!

Andiry described building the world's first fault-tolerant non-volatile main memory file system at SOSP'17 in Shanghai. The resulting file system -- NOVA-fortis -- provides a mechanism to take consistent snapshots to facilitate backups and protects both metadata and file data from media and software errors. Here's the full paper.

While he was on the continent, Andiry is also presenting NOVA at Tsinghua University, Wuhan university, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

The start of the school year brings new faces to the NVSL. Juno Kim has just arrived from Yale as a new PhD student. Shengan Zheng and Jeff Kim are visiting for a year from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Samsung, respectively. Finally, Ada Qu, Eric Perez, and Qingchen Dang have joined us as part of the ERSP program.

NVSL students family and friends joined newly minted Drs. Yang "Robert" Liu, Meenakshi Sundaram Bhaskaran, Michael Wei, and Yanqin Jin for lunch before the graduation ceremony. We were especially happy to have so mayn of their parents and family members in attenance.

Another NVSL alumn, Akshatha Gangadharaiah, was also in the graduation ceremony.

Best of luck to all of you, and thank you for all your hard work! We will miss you!

Yang "Robert" Liu and Meenakshi Sundaram Bhaskaran successfully defended their dissertations on the 9th and 8th of December, respectively. Robert's work on "Systems and Algorithm Support for Efficient Heterogeneous Computing with GPUs" broke new ground in integrating GPUs and conventional processors. Sundaram, in the meantime, developed new ways of integrating non-volatile memories into systems at multiple levels with "Micro-Architecture and Systems Support for Emerging Non-Volatile Memories."

Robert is headed to Western Digital. Sundaram is setting off on a great (and secret) adventure.

Robin Harris, well-known storage blogger has put up a nice piece about NOVA and it's potential role in systems equipped with non-volatile main memory technologies like Intel's 3D XPoint. You can read about it here. Thanks Robin!

NOVA is a log-structured file system designed for byte-addressable, non-volatile memories. NOVA is fully POSIX compliant so that existing applications need not be modified to run on NOVA. NOVA bypasses the block layer and OS page cache, writes to NVM directly and reduces the software overhead.

NOVA combines a novel logging scheme and journalling to provide strong consistency guarantees, good scalability, and fast recovery time. NOVA maintains a private log for each iNode, allowing for concurrent accesses, updates, and recovery from system failures.